The Illusion of Progress
by Dance Elle Dance
Summary: She could be her, with her dark hair and dark eyes and petite frame, but...she is not. No one ever is. MichaelAnnie, post-H2, oneshot


_**Disclaimer: **__I don't own Halloween._

_**Summary: She could be her, with her dark hair and dark eyes and petite frame, but...she is not. No one ever is. MichaelAnnie, post-H2, oneshot**_

_Okay, so this was originally planned to be written for Halloween, but my computer broke and then school... It was just a mess. But here it is! I've finally finished it. I haven't written a oneshot - or anything for this particular fandom - in a very long time. I just hope that everyone likes this latest addition to the MichaelAnnie section of this particular fandom. Thanks so much for reading! _

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**The Illusion of Progress**

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She could be her.

The Shape muses over this as he watches her from afar, the knife tightly held in his all-too capable hands.

However...

Her gait is too dainty, her smile too soft, her eyes too wide and innocent and full of..._nothing._

Michael Myers does not think himself the type to ponder too much about anything, but at this he finds himself...vexed.

This girl...the one he had been stalking the entire day, the one that he had been quietly and discreetly rallying into the very position she was in now...was _not _her.

He can not explain exactly why this unsettles him.

Night had fallen relatively quickly. The last day of October is usually like that, as if welcoming his return each and every year. Somehow, this soothes him when nothing else can.

He inhales deeply, the sound intensified by the close proximity of his mask, and tightly squeezes the handle of his knife.

The girl is saying something, talking to one of her friends - this friend a tall, leggy blonde wearing a Letterman, her loud voice boisterous enough to wake the town.

A calm anger curls in his stomach at the image that brings - almost as if looking at a cheap movie replicating that night from so long ago. He almost expects the third girl to look eerily like his baby sister, but she does not and that breaks the illusion. She is small - smaller than the brunette - and her hair is a bright red, the kind that one would buy from the bottle. The one thing she has in common with his sister are her dark-rimmed glasses.

His focus is, however, not on the girl that stands in for his sister, but on the dark-haired girl who looks so much like - and yet still is _nothing _like - the one who captured his attention many years ago.

Her hair is too light of a brown - still dark, but not as dark as _hers_. She is too tall, too thin, almost unhealthily so. Her skin is too dark, her nose too flat. She is her and isn't her all at the same time.

He tries not to focus on this as he moves from shadow to shadow, avoiding the streetlights and where they illuminate splotches of the town. Safety precaution. For people trying to stop people like him. But everyone thinks him dead. And that is an advantage in and of itself.

He knows all too well how to dodge bullets like that. After all, he has been at this for a while. He is _good_ at death. Especially when it is this easy.

The brown-haired girl - he cannot take his eyes off her, for whatever reason - is saying something about a party later on tonight. Her voice is too high-pitched, he notices, to be of any relation to _his _girl.

The redhead turns away first, walking to a large, two-story house across the street from the two of them. She calls out a promise to be at the party later tonight. Wherever it is. The blonde and brunette smile and wave her off. He continues to follow them.

The brunette says something and the blonde laughs. They walk together for a while before the blonde grins and waves a hand at the other girl, walking into a small house on the same street that they had been walking on for what seems like forever.

Michael stops. He hears the faint sound of the blonde's front door closing. Hears the sound of the brunette's shoes as they skim the sidewalk. He stares at her for a moment, watching the sway of her walk, watching how the moonlight catches her hair -

_- screaming. Blood. Dark hair and dark eyes and dark blood dripping from the corner of her mouth. The knife goes in and she cries out, falling over something in the process, ending up crashing into the bathroom. The blood spreads out along the tiles. He steps in it, hearing the pleasant squishing sound that accompanies such an action. Her eyes are wide and full of life, life that he is about to take - _

The flashing of images is gone as soon as it came, leaving him with a sense of unease that is uncharacteristic of him, and a name on the edges of his thoughts.

_Annie._

The dark-haired girl has walked further away from him, more often than not to her own house. That's fine. He knows where she lives. He knows the entrances and exits and how many people live in that house - her mom, her brother, her grandmother. So he is not worried.

He watches her turn into a small house at the end of the street, but does not go after her.

Instead, he grips his knife and climbs the steps of the blonde girl's house.

He will save that maddening doppelgänger for last.

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_**End.**_


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